Can Nothing Save Us? by Irvine Welsh review – US family saga is a late-career triumph

“Why expect unconditional love from somebody you’ve brought into a fucked, dying planet, who then has to sit around and watch you screw it up even more?” So muses twentysomething college dropout Luke Ayrton on his parental lineage as he works the Las Vegas Strip, “comping girls for clubs” in Sin City. His job is to trawl the “plankton” of bacherlorette parties in order to lure the “whales” – rich men willing to spend to try to impress young women.

“In this game your sociology skills sharpened,” it’s observed, but beyond the seedy side hustle lie weightier concerns: the matter of his family legacy. Electronic dance music aficionado and aspiring writer Luke is estranged from his Maga-positive Mom and Dad, and now lives with grandparents George and Molly, affluent boomers with a countercultural past.

Vietnam vet and retired lawyer George sees himself as a “hippy sellout”, his dream of pursuing human rights advocacy corrupted by real estate deals and entertainment law. Actor Molly’s early theatre and independent cinema success led only to small parts in low-budget film and TV. Grandson Luke is set to inherit their fortune, yet struggles for meaning against a background of disappointment and growing despair: an intergenerational nihilism that deepens like a coastal shelf.

Irvine Welsh’s 16th novel Can Nothing Save Us? comes as something of a surprise. An epic American family saga, it explores a collective emotional malaise at the heart of a great power in decline. This is a bold and ambitious work, in which Welsh deftly shifts point of view with confidence and conviction: his ability to jump generations and to capture the voices and feelings of his disparate cast of characters is at times quite astonishing.

Our author’s way into this garish universe is clearly via his familiarity with the Las Vegas club scene. There’s an early namecheck of Scottish DJ Calvin Harris, friend and collaborator with a long-term residency on the Strip. Welsh’s ear for the demotic is as strong as ever as he conveys the slang and grammar of Luke’s world, as well as the sense of being a small player on the periphery of a bewildering, drug-addled circuit. The theme of generational trench warfare is neatly set up at a legal meeting where Luke’s parents, Gina and Don, are informed of their disinheritance by Molly and George. A standard trope of family drama takes a Rabelaisian turn. “Me grow up?” Gina retorts at maternal accusations of immaturity. “You drink your own urine and walk around naked.” The elderly couple’s “urotherapy” remains a rather desperate last vestige of an alternative lifestyle, perhaps a metaphor for the diminished returns of a dying idealism. Welsh’s knack for absurd social satire is regularly deployed to interrogate serious themes and visit dark places.

In Vietnam, George was a witness to the My Lai massacre, when hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians were murdered by US soldiers. He is also a survivor of a lone gunman’s attack on the Las Vegas Strip from the Mandalay Bay Hotel in 2017. The buried trauma of past atrocities seems to feed a societal yearning for the freedom to bear arms. “The mass-shooting at Mandalay Bay had no long-term impact,” Welsh comments. “White Americans, at least on a conceptual level, didn’t mind being shot at by other white Americans; some even considered it their birthright.”

Facing his own mortality, George excavates the past with his PTSD-ridden fellow veterans, as elsewhere in the land of the free a resigned feeling of rearmament reigns. An anonymous and ultra-disaffected “weapons engineer” is tooling up to settle his score with society. An ayahuasca ceremony at a desert commune descends into gun-toting mayhem. And on a hunting trip planned as a family bonding exercise, Luke finds himself aiming a rifle at his father, Don.

The plot develops a mercilessly ballistic energy of its own as multiple storylines converge on another mass shooting, this time at an outdoor festival called Our Rave’s Electric. A complex and explosive denouement almost succumbs to the chaos it depicts, though in the end the only control on the narrative seems the fateful trajectory of a familiar American tragedy. Its inevitability only makes it all the more pitiful.

We are left with a poignant coda of post-trauma, and a disturbing sense that this is merely part of an unending, generational cycle. Can Nothing Save Us? has apparently had a long gestation period, at one time in development as a TV project. That Welsh has finally realised this story in such an expansive, compelling and heartfelt novel is something of a literary triumph, proof that this medium remains the best kind of long-form narrative. And it’s certainly a late-career tour de force for the author himself.

Jake Arnott’s latest novel is Netherwood (Titan). Can Nothing Save Us? by Irvine Welsh is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.